Barry Goldwater Feels Strong Pull to Left : Arizona: Given the right presidential candidate, Mr. Republican might just turn into a Democrat. His first choice is Colin Powell, though he’s backing Bob Dole at the moment.

From the vantage of his house above the city, and of his 86 years, Barry Goldwater looks over the valley and talks political heresy: given the right presidential candidate, he might just turn into a Democrat.

And the “right” candidate isn’t the one he’s endorsed.

It’s Colin Powell, retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who hasn’t said which party he’d run in, should he decide to enter the 1996 campaign. Goldwater guesses Republican, but said that independent or even Democrat, Powell would still be his first choice for the White House.

His old Republican Establishment won’t like that, but so what.

“I just sit out here and say to hell with them,” Goldwater says. The man whose name long was a synonym for conservative Republican was cantankerous before, and he’s more so now. It’s been 31 years since he was trounced for the White House, nine since his final farewell to the Senate. The step is slowed, the memory not always reliable, but the voice and the profile are firm and unmistakable.

He’s talking politics at his desk beside the glass wall that offers a view of the Phoenix skyline, territory he remembers as open desert that is now worth $1 million for two acres. He knows, he said, because he just sold a lot down the hill.

Goldwater is supporting Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, the majority leader and front-runner for the 1996 Republican nomination. “That’s a peculiar situation,” he says, pausing. “But don’t say anything.”

He’s for Dole; in fact, he’s the honorary state chairman of the senator’s campaign. “I’m honored to have Senator Goldwater on my team,” Dole said four weeks ago when he came to Phoenix to campaign and raise funds for 1996. “I remember back in ’64 I was on his team.”

Goldwater had a reception at his home for $1,000 Dole contributors, about 100 of them. “A little gathering of fat cats,” he recalls. Even so, he would prefer Powell. He describes him as the challenger with the best chance of leading a Republican ticket that would beat President Clinton.

“If Powell decides to run, he’ll get elected President,” Goldwater says in a conversational interview, politics interspersed with reminiscences. “If he runs as a Democrat, I might turn into a Democrat.”

His theory, though--and he was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--is that Powell really is a Republican, because most military men lean that way even if they won’t say so.

“I was trying to get him to tell me,” Goldwater says, but Powell wouldn’t.

Absent Powell, Goldwater says, “then Dole will get it,” at least the nomination. “We’re not going to have an easy time beating Clinton. This guy makes a hell of a good speech. He’s a good thinker.”

So Goldwater ventures another option: Dole and Powell on the same ticket. “The next time around they could just switch places,” he says.

Goldwater likes blunt talk, and obviously enjoys the fallout. He’s caused stirs by backing abortion rights and gays in the military, by endorsing a liberal Democrat in an Arizona congressional race in 1992--she won but lost two years later. Conservatives, some of whom wanted his name erased from the state party headquarters, suspected his second wife, Susan, 31 years his junior, was influencing him with her liberal views.

In his newly published biography, “Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution,” author Lee Edwards notes that he never was a model of consistency. He is “sometimes a traditionalist and sometimes a libertarian,” wrote Edwards, communications director in Goldwater’s 1964 campaign.

“People say that I’m more of a libertarian than a Republican,” Goldwater says. “I don’t think there’s a lot of difference.”

Edwards calls Goldwater the most influential of presidential losers, the one who began a shift in power from East to West, liberal to conservative, and so, in landslide defeat, opened the way for Ronald Reagan and for the Republicans who now run Congress.

Goldwater’s own appraisal:

“If you hang around long enough, you know, everything changes.”